Natural Architecture, By Petrus Talemarianus
Preface
to the English Translation
By Joscelyn Godwin
In offering this translation of L’architecture naturelle to the English-speaking public, we do not
pretend to resolve all the mysteries surrounding the book and its authorship.
By its own testimony, it was written in Latin by one Petrus Talemarianus,
during the hundred months preceding the summer solstice of 1944, then offered
to Alexandre Rouhier, who oversaw its translation into French, its editing, and
its illustration. In 1949, the small Parisian publisher Les Éditions Véga issued
the first edition of 252 copies, printed on separate folios with a page size of
22 by 15 inches and contained in a red cloth slipcase. In 1982, Véga issued a full-sized
facsimile reprint and also a version in smaller format, about the size of the
present volume.
Where
such an unusual production is concerned, anything is credible, even the
existence somewhere of an original Latin manuscript. But a gentle mystification
is also possible, and indeed respectable for works of esoteric wisdom. The United
States Catalog of Copyright Entries (Jan.-June 1977) identifies Petrus
Talemarianus as Alexandre Rouhier himself, on the authority of Odette Rouhier (his
daughter[1]). Not
much has been published about Dr. Rouhier, but he is famous for one thing: a
pharmacologist by profession, he was a pioneer in the first-hand study of
hallucinogenic drugs and the author of the classic book on peyote: Le Peyotl, la plante qui fait les yeux
émerveillés (Peyotl, the plant that fills the eyes with wonder, 1927), and the
shorter Les plantes divinatoires
(Plants of divination, 1927). At least five years earlier, he had been lecturing
on the subject to a “Groupe Paléosophique” whose members included the Belgian
composer and theorist Ernest Britt (1857-after 1950), the mathematician and
historian Francis Warrain (1867-1940), and the psychical researcher Eugène
Caslant.[2]
These
names introduce us to an obscure group of scientifically-minded esotericists,
who were searching not only in traditions like Kabbalah and Platonism but also
in mathematics and the physical sciences for the links between mind and body,
God and man, the Absolute and the manifest. Francis Warrain is probably the
most significant of them, and is the sole contemporary authority cited in L’architecture naturelle. The Editor
adds that he submitted the manuscript to him, and includes an unpublished essay
of Warrain’s as an appendix. Warrain’s difficult works ranged over higher
mathematics, Kabbalah, music theory, monographs on Kepler’s cosmology and on
the polymathic Charles Henry (1859-1926), and culminated with an immense
unfinished study of the Polish “philosopher of the Absolute,” Hoëné Wronski
(1776-1853).
If L’architecture naturelle virtually
ignores the twentieth century, it is hardly more cognizant of nineteenth-century
authorities. Apart from the mathematicians named in the section on regular
solids, only two names appear: Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817-1894), an
important medical researcher whose discoveries helped Charles Henry to develop
his own theories of psychophysics, and Wronski, whose life inspired Balzac’s
novel La recherche de l’absolu. The
focus grows sharper when we add that Ernest Britt, too, was a lifelong admirer
of Wronski, and that he and his wealthy second wife supported Wronskian
enterprises in France and Poland, including the publication by the same house
of Véga of Warrain’s L’Oeuvre
philosophique de Hoëné Wronski (three vols., 1933-38). If with this loose
circle of French Wronskians we have not reached the creator(s) of L’architecture naturelle, at least they
were tangential to it.
Some
readers will soon spot another influence: that of René Guénon (1886-1951), the
father of French Traditionalism. Although Talemarianus never mentions Guénon by
name, he sows clues by using such phrases as “the multiple states of being,”
and by basing his metaphysical hierarchy, from “Non-manifestation” downwards,
on similar principles to Guénon’s. Like the latter, he takes it for granted
that wisdom is to be sought in the ancient religious and philosophical
traditions of East and West; that these traditions, rightly understood, are in
accord with one another; and that the monuments of literature and architecture,
at least up to the Renaissance period, encode a perennial esoteric knowledge.
The
connection with Guénon goes further, for it was on his initiative that Éditions
Véga, publisher of L’architecture
naturelle, was founded. This happened in 1929-30, during Guénon’s brief
liaison with an American heiress, Mary Wallace Shillito (1876 or 1878-1938).[3] Mary was
the daughter of a
This
was not how things turned out. The couple left for
L’architecture naturelle could well be
called a Traditionalist work in the Guénonian sense, but it lacks the negative
attitude assumed by most of those who wear that label. While Guénon, in such
works as The Crisis of the Modern World
and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs
of the Times, was one of modernity’s sharpest critics, Talemarianus does
not bother with polemics or utter apocalyptic warnings. With the exceptions
mentioned above, he simply ignores anything later than the seventeenth century.
Rabelais, Kepler, and the Château of Versailles are as far as he cares to go. [5] Having begun
his “Report” early in 1936 and labored at it “for a hundred months” that took
him throughout the second World War, he finished it on June 24, 1944, during the
heat of the Normandy invasion—of which it bears not the slightest trace.
Véga’s
publication of it in 1949 was another act of positive defiance of the times. The
extravagance and gigantic size of the book, its superb typography and hundreds
of illustrations, and the declared intention of teaching architects how to
build houses and palaces, churches, and temples with natural materials, in
accordance with natural laws, were as contrary as possible to the drabness and
shoddiness of the post-war world.
Much
of the credit for the book’s beauty goes to Marcel Nicaud, an employee of the
French national museums whom Rouhier apparently brought into the project.
Nicaud’s other known work includes book illustrations and the copying and
restoration of medieval wall-paintings.[6] The
decision to use no photographic reproductions, but to have Nicaud redraw even
well-known alchemical engravings, as well as a host of artefacts from every
corner of the globe, gives L’architecture
naturelle its graphic unity. The only comparison that comes to mind is
Manly Palmer Hall’s masterpiece of 1928, The
Secret Teachings of All Ages, with its fine typography and color-plates by J.
Augustus Knapp.
As
for the enigmatic figure of Petrus Talemarianus, the catalogues of some rare
book dealers, evidently privy to inside information, identify him not as Alexandre
Rouhier but as “Bordeaux-Montrieux.” That is the surname of a distinguished
French family, a branch of which owns the Château de Talmay, in the village of
that name east of
Joscelyn Godwin,
Ariel Godwin,
June 2006
[1] Odette Rouhier is
identified as Dr. Rouhier’s daughter, and quoted on the subject of her father’s
relations with René Guénon, in Jean Robin, René
Guénon, Témoin de la tradition (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1986), p. 202 n.
[2] Information on the
Groupe Paléosophique and on Ernest and Mary Britt comes from the Britt papers
in the library of the
[3] On Mary Shillito and
Guénon, see Jean-Pierre Laurant, Le sens
caché dans l’oeuvre de René Guénon (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1975), p. 210;
Jean Robin, René Guénon, Témoin de la
tradition (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1986), pp. 201-202; Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.
74-75, 288. See also The History of
Cincinnati and Hamilton County (Cincinnati: S.B. Nelson & Co., 1894), pp. 476-477, which describes John
Shillito’s career and states that at the time of writing, his daughter Mary was
married to “Henry P. Rogers of
[4] According to the history of the Château des Avenières (see previous note), Britt exhausted Mary’s
fortune in five years; they sold the château in 1936 and divorced in 1937. She
died in an accident the following year. The financing of L’architecture naturelle must therefore have come from elsewhere.
[5] It is also almost
wholly lacking in references to Islam: a tradition that did not figure much in
Guénon’s works before he left France, and whose esoteric dimension (Sufism) was
then hardly known in
[6] Searches of the Internet during 2005-06, notably that of the Patrimoine
de France and of the Centre des monuments nationaux, have shown that Marcel
Nicaud was active from the 1940s until at least 1967 copying medieval
wall-paintings for archival purposes and restoring them. He also illustrated
Jean Marquès-Rivière, Rituel de magie
tantrique hindoue (Véga, 1939) and Yüan Kuang: Méthode pratique de divination
chinoise par le “Yi-king” (Véga, 1950).
[7] See, for example,
Catalog no. 314 of Burgersdijk en Niermans (
[8] Thanks to M. J.-P.
Laurant of the École Pratique des Hautes Études for apprising us of the
Bordeaux-Montrieux connection.